Thursday, January 23, 2014

A child raised in the bottom fifth of the income scale through much of the southern United States has around a 5 percent chance of rising to the top fifth—4 percent in Atlanta and 4.3 percent in Charlotte—while a low-income child has a 9.6 percent chance of rising in Los Angeles and 11.2 percent in San Francisco. Do Republicans think poor kids in California are just twice as likely to be hardworking as poor kids in Georgia and North Carolina? Or might there be something else going on?

Unfortunately I can already hear the response, which will involve blah people. Still, these are useful statistics to have at hand.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

"Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at," writes one Standard & Poor's executive. "As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it," confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value," complains another senior S&P man. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters," ruminates one more. [...]

40 percent of the world's wealth was wiped out in the aftermath of the mortgage bubble, according to some estimates. 2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction. If you can imagine a post-9/11 scenario where there were no metal detectors at airports and people could walk on carrying chain saws and meat cleavers, you get a rough idea of what was done to reform the ratings process.

Bettering the lives of anyone but the wealthy, as we know, has ceased to be a concern of the Republican Party. But millions of Americans are on the brink of buying affordable health insurance and freeing themselves from a worry that makes their lives utter misery; the concerted effort backed by some of the richest men in this country to deprive them of that chance may be without precedent for sheer malice. Indifference to the plight and suffering of human beings of one class or another by some segment of the population is a universal phenomenon, but spending millions of dollars to deepen the misery of one’s fellow citizens and enlisting members of one political party to help you do so is downright vile. It must be motivated as much by sadism as by the political calculation that if these uninsured were to get insurance, they would give the Democratic Party a governing majority simply out of gratitude for letting them see a doctor.

These are not precisely the same behaviors but they are definitely connected.

Republicans did not do this to Social Security. Majorities of Republicans voted in favor of Social Security. About half of Republicans also voted for Medicare. A group of senators sought to defund the Vietnam War, but that group was bipartisan. No, there’s never been an effort quite like this. It’s truly astonishing to step back and think about it. The great uniting cause of the Republican Party of the Obama era, the one thing they’re spent more time and energy on than any other, is preventing uninsured Americans from obtaining insurance.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Boehner does not bend to the will of his Kamikaze Caucus because he is an evil man. He does so because he is a weak man. To borrow a line from Theodore Roosevelt, I could carve a better man out of a banana.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

There is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy. Of course the Democrats are disappointing---that's what makes them Democrats. If they were any more frustrating they'd be your relatives. But in this country they are all that stands between you and darkest night. You know why their symbol is the letter 'D'? Because it's a grade that means 'good enough, but just barely.' You know why the Republican symbol is 'R'? Because it's the noise a pirate makes when he robs you and feeds you to a shark.

[Everyone else seems to have already read this quote. Can't find the original source, so no citation. h/t Bill in Portland Maine]

Sunday, July 28, 2013

It took me awhile to figure out what exactly it was that is so very irritating about Kate Middleton. There is something terribly perverse that while in the States (and even in Britain) the rights of women are under increasing assault, where women are still having to struggle for basic respect, justice and equality, where the right to control their own bodies is under threat, the media and the royal celebrity watchers are “celebrating” the birth of a baby to a woman who famously has never held a real job in her life despite her privileged education, who does nothing of any consequence whatsoever and never has, whose contrived posh accent wincingly rivals Lincolnshire grocer’s daughter Margaret Thatcher’s studied vowels, who seems to exude all the personality and warmth of a plastic Barbie doll, and whose sole purpose for existence seems to be nothing more than be a walking womb for her aristocratic “betters” to procreate more of themselves and foist the massive expense of it all on the British taxpayer. In a country where one in three babies born live in poverty - not much to celebrate there.

Kate Middleton represents the worst of female aspirations - to be such a completely empty vessel that her only definition as a human being is who she married and to whom she gave birth. But what is worse, far worse, is the media’s admiration and fascination with such a woman.

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power. [. . .]

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace.

[Emphasis mine.] He notes that we can't vote our way out of this situation nor rely on the courts. The only way out? Radical mass movements. And if, like the Pequod's crew in Moby Dick, we fail to rise up through "habit, cowardice, and hubris," we will slide into serfdom.And I'm pretty sure that rising up is not in the cards.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

...was said by Charles Pierce the other day, after watching the press fawn over Bush and his new library:

The coverage of the opening of this vast temple to prevarication and ruin is not about bricks and mortar. It's about an attempt by the courtier press to absolve itself of a dereliction of duty that rivaled even that of the president in question while New Orleans drowned, and while the economy was bubbling toward disaster. (That dereliction of duty, it should be noted, now and forever, began with the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, and the disgraceful performance of the elite political press corps towards Al Gore.) It's about their efforts to help the country absolve itself from the immense damage it brought upon itself by electing, and then re-electing, a half-bright dry drunk who wrecked nearly everything he touched, and who now is trying to rehabilitate himself by explaining that he hasn't ruined anything else since he left office, and doesn't that make him a swell fella. The elite press is dedicating an entire day of coverage to the perpetuation of a monstrous public lie. Electing George W. Bush twice was a monumental act of democratic self-destruction from which the country has yet to recover. Celebrating him celebrating himself is simply to pour battery acid into the still-open wounds. I will take theories about dinosaurs in ancient China over the notion that George W. Bush was a good man confronted by insurmountable problems dropped on him by an implacable universe of chance. He was a career fk-up, from start to finish, and he finally found himself in a job where Daddy's money and Daddy's lawyers couldn't bail him out.

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